Monday, June 18, 2007

Chopping Mall - Capsule Review

Here's a cover for the never-officially-released score from Jim Wynorski's hilarious killer mall security robot epic Chopping Mall. Also known by the even cooler name of Killbots. If it had actually been released as Killbots it would've made for a cool Double Feature with Killdozer. Of course those don't really have much in common apart from 'kill' in the title, and they were made like a decade apart. Maybe it wouldn't have worked as a Double Feature, but at least it would've looked cool on a marquee. On a pointless side note, there are actually bands called both The Killbots and Killdozer, which pisses me off because I totally would of used either of those names for my own band. You know, if I had an actual band that is.

Moving on. Chopping Mall was Wynorski's second film, after something I've never seen called The Lost Empire. It features a trio of robots (one of whom has an unpleasantly ethnic quality) who are designed to act as overnight security guards. Of course, as with any movie ever made that features any kind of robot, the robots eventually turn evil and try to kill every human that they can kill. And kill humans they do, including one poor woman (with kinda scary looking lopsided fake boobs) who has her head blown off in one of the all time great comedic exploding head scenes. With the mix of humor, horror (albeit very slight horror) and exploding heads it's really kinda like a 70-minute version of Dawn of the Dead, if the zombies were security guards. And robots.

11 comments:

Hellbishop
said...

Ooo thanks! I remember the first time renting the vhs version and expecting a total piece of crud but instead got some pretty entertaining sci-fi horror. A few cool actors and actresses were in this like the swinging couple from TERRORVISION and the guy who plays a janitor in this one who got offed as a gun shop owner in the Terminator. Will be interesting to hear the music without the imagery of the movie in front of me.

Hellbishop - Hey, yeah Dick Miller is that guy from Terminator, one of my favorite character actors. I actually yelled out "Dick Miller...No!!!" when he was killed by one of the Killbots. Joe Dante uses him a lot actually, Gremlins, The Burbs (garbage man), the It's A Good Life Segment from Twilight Zone: The Movie. That guy is awesome. Hope you enjoy the music.

Anonymous - Hi, actually I don't have the artwork, I just whipped that cover up myself. I don't know if there is artwork for it actually since I don't think there was ever an official release of it. If you want I could probably make a back cover to it, but the only high quality image from the film I have is what I used for the front. I can do it if you don't mind it being the same.

A few weeks ago they actually did a screening of CHOPPING MALL at one of the local theaters here in Los Angeles, very rad. This saturday they are showing the movie "The Gate" and in a few weeks "Over the Top" and "The Wraith" will be shown! So awesome.

The Deathstalker/Chopping Mall CD doesn't feature the complete CM score. In fact,many of the excellent cues heard in the film are absent.

I'll happily shell out for a complete,re-mastered edition with all of the music,but I made the mistake of getting the truncated version,and am thrilled to have this bootleg,which features nearly everything.